Landfall

The Stars Like Sand

The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry is a well-reviewed 2014 anthology of Australian science fiction, fantasy and horror poetry that I co-edited with P. S. Cottier. You can buy The Stars Like Sand from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle ebook.

Men Briefly Explained

Men Briefly Explained is my 2011 poetry collection that explains men, briefly. You can buy Men Briefly Explained from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle ebook.

My Library from LibraryThing

About Me

I'm a writer, editor, anthologist, and now blogger who was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England and moved to New Zealand with my family when I was 2.
I grew up on the West Coast and in Southland, then went to Dunedin to go to Otago University before moving to Wellington in 1993. I'm married with one child.
I'm juggling the writing of poetry, short fiction and novels, working part time, trying to be a good husband and father, and working hard to get New Zealand to take effective action on climate change - not to mention all the other problems the world faces. Life is busy!

26 September 2013

From time to time I contribute to the Herald on Sunday's Book Watch column, and my latest column is below. I write brief notes on four books I've written recently - the Herald usually chooses three of these to include in the column, and this time, they decided to leave out the review of Jane Kelsey's latest book about the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. But here are all four mini-reviews!

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement
is currently under negotiation between the US and 9 other countries in the
Asia-Pacific region, including New Zealand. It has relatively little to do with
trade but a great deal to do with taking various aspects of the law of these
countries - covering such issues as investment policy, environment policy, and
intellectual property and copyright policy - outside the control of their
citizens and placing them under corporate control. I don't like that idea, and
NZ academic Jane Kelsey doesn’t either. This concise and readable study is a
good introduction to why we should all be concerned about the TPPA.

Disclaimer: I have a story in this volume. I have not
considered it for the purposes of this review.

I enjoyed reading The Apex Book of
World SF 2 a lot. Rather than going for the usual Anglo-American
suspects, editor Lavie Tidhar has assembled an anthology of science fiction
stories from authors around the world, with South America, Europe and Asia
especially well represented. Like any anthology, there are some stories that
didn't grab me, but also a number I liked very much: my favourite was "The
Sound of Breaking Glass" by Joyce Chng of Singapore, a delicate and moving
story.

Having enjoyed Joyce Chng’s story in The Apex Book
of World SF 2, I bought her novel Wolf at the Door,
written as J. Damask. This novel is about werewolves of Chinese descent living
in Singapore – and I enjoyed this one too. Its great strength is the way the
author interleaves the social dynamics of wolf pack and human family, as both
family members and outsiders threaten to disrupt the lives of the protagonist and
those near and dear to her. There are some flashbacks that didn’t work as well
for me, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the main story, which is
well characterised and well told.

Sarah Jane Barnett’s collection, which was shortlisted
for the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards, is notable both for its technical
excellence and for the breadth of the poems’ subject matter – from death row
inmates to pipeline workers. While I didn’t always connect with the subject
matter of these poems, the best poems here both moved and impressed me – such
as “Mountains”, selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2012, which I encourage you to read. Any lover of poetry should seek out
this book.

19 September 2013

When horror writer and editor William Cook approached me a while back to ask if I'd be interested in submitting a horror story to his new anthology Fresh Fear: Contemporary Horror, I was unsure, because I hadn't written a horror story for a very long time - there are two in my first collection, Extreme Weather Events, but I hadn't written any since.

But I gave it a go, and I'm pleased to say that my story "Protein" was accepted for the anthology. You can check out the cover above and the enticing Table of Contents on William's blog. There are a number of writers there whose work I'm really looking forwards to reading!

behind scrying-glass,
crystal, speculum,
the lighting of a candle
and the speaking of a name -

you never know.
That is the truth of every incantation.
You never know
what will come to the flame

Credit note: Published in Strange Horizons, February 13, 2006, and included in my second collection, All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens.

Tim says: When I wrote this poem, I had recently read John Crowley's novel The Solitudes (also published as Aegypt, but in fact the first volume of the Aegypt tetralogy), and it was inspired by the book's depiction of the 16th-century magicians and alchemists John Dee and Edward Kelley working, under conditions of great secrecy, to contact the angels and learn their secrets: explorers, but explorers of a particularly furtive kind. I went into excessive detail about the composition of this poem in a previous post.

At this event, James Cone asked a question which I thought was very interesting, but which it was hard for him to get across briefly. Talking to James afterwards, I suggested that the issue he raised might go better as a blog post - and here it is! See what you think.

Social Democracy and the Next Settlement

Social democracy, the way the
English-speaking countries were governed after World War II, until the first
peak oil in the 1970s, was a deal. Government authorised unions to
bargain and strike, so workers got paid well, so they made things for
manufacturers to sell, so manufacturers made a profit, so they could pay
workers well.

To understand how deals like that work, it's probably
worth-while to take a short side-trip into what 'because' means.
Aristotle recognised four kinds of cause. A final cause is what
something is for. A formal cause is what plan it follows. Efficient
causes are the ones that we take for granted now, where the ankle-bone moves, because
the hip bone is moving, and they are connected via the knee bone.
Material cause took me a long time to understand; it is where an object,
such as a table, is there because its outline is full of stuff, such as the
wood that it's made of.

Social settlements have to satisfy needs for final
causes (often expressed as people thinking they're fair), formal causes (the
rules can be written) and efficient causes (the manufacturer, worker and customer
in my example are all well-enough off).

That deal makes two assumptions: that
having more stuff is good for people, and that there is no constraint on the raw
materials and energy that go into making it. The second is now definitely
false, and the first is being re-examined.

In the new conditions, I do not
know what the next social settlement is, yet. I think that I'll recognise
it when I see it. I'm looking for a plan where the children of
beneficiaries and minimum-wage workers eat a diet with enough first-class
protein and no unavoidable conspicuously harmful features, as a natural
consequence of the way the rest of the political-economic world is organised.

Bio: James Cone

James is a 'lost', a magpie, and a
cognitive barbarian. So far, he has studied four years of Computer
Science, had one career in computing, completed two thirds of a sociology
degree, and now walks someone else's dogs (names removed to protect the guilty)
on a voluntary basis. He has been collecting small, shiny ideas since almost
before he could talk. Given a situation that resembles a Gordian Knot, he
thinks that the right response is often to imagine a novel slice through it.
If you ask, he may talk to you about non-violence theory and wicked
problems, but this will not make your life simpler.EDIT: My thanks to Colin James for drawing my attention to the role of economic theory; see for example page two of: http://www.colinjames.co.nz/speeches_briefings/Treasury_conference_comments_12Dec11.pdf